


If Only All Threats Were This Inept

by AngeNoir



Category: Kate Daniels - Ilona Andrews
Genre: (to the best of my ability at least), Building a family, Canon Compliant, Case Fic, F/M, Family, Parenthood, post-Magic Slays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 13:23:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5418683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Until Curran and I can find a school in the city, Julie's stuck in shapeshifter school. Which, okay, can be a problem but generally isn't, especially since she and Ascanio are at least not <em>as</em> antagonistic as they used to be.</p><p>But then something happens in their magic class, and what looks like a prank turns out not to be.</p><p>It also turns out to register pink on the m-scanner, so really, we're all trying to figure it out before it becomes a bigger problem (than it already is).</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Only All Threats Were This Inept

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raktajinos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raktajinos/gifts).



> I... have no idea if this is what you wanted. I definitely tried to showcase Julie and Kate coming closer together, but it really just turned into case!fic.

How Curran handles this on the day to day I’ll never know.

He was out of the Keep for the week – he’s been trying to set up a way to steadily get a panacea supply to the Keep, and while I appreciated the effort, leaving me at the mercy of the Council, Aunt B, and Julie was just plain evil of him.

Next time, I was going with him.

While he was gone, I wasn’t Kate Daniels, mercenary ass-kicker in her own right. No, I was the Consort, my authority tempered by Curran’s, and it didn’t matter how much I was an ass-kicker – I was also not my own person.

I hated responsibility. It made me itch.

“Kate…”

I turned away from the window and lifted an eyebrow at Barabas.

“You might want to come settle Julie down. She and Ascanio…”

I didn’t wait for him to finish what he was saying; I stalked past him. I probably should have waited for him to say something, if only because that sentence could end so many ways now. After the Lighthouse Keepers, something had shifted between Ascanio and Julie, and while I’d like to say it was for the better, they got into too much shit for it to be anything but a continuing headache for me. Instead, whenever their names came up together, there was either an explosive fight, screaming that echoed throughout the Keep, or utter chaos as they systematically took apart someone or something because they were bored.

Shapeshifter school was not something I had ever wanted for Julie, if only because it stressed, over and over, absolute control to children and teenagers who had none. The control that youngsters under the age of 25 exerted was pitiful and practically nonexistent. I had always felt shapeshifters ran herd over bombs they had to defuse within moments instead of actually teaching things that people needed in the real world. Of course, Julie had forced my hand and made it clear she wouldn’t go to school far away from the craziness of my life. She had only been back in Atlanta for a week at most, though, and so while we checked out each school in the city she hadn’t immediately vetoed, that wouldn’t give me conniptions, _and_ met my exacting standards of what a school should teach, there wasn’t anywhere she could go. And, unfortunately, I’d made it clear that _no_ school wasn’t even an option.

Therefore, she was here, where Ascanio was, and where her friend Maddie was, and she was surrounded by shapeshifters who were getting ready to either go loup or control their beast selves. Hopefully we’d find her a school in the city and she’d be gone, but until then she was stuck here. And the sad thing wasn’t that I thought she couldn’t handle herself (even though, realistically, she couldn’t in some of the scenarios she got herself into). No, it was that she _could_ handle it, but it was in fact unfair to the rest of the kids who were neither more important nor less important than one another. They had to treat her with kid gloves, which she both resented and exploited like a true street rat.

Which. I mean, I couldn’t fault her for – why not, right? But at the same time, as Consort, I had to figure out how to draw a line and walk it without straying too far into favoring her, or going too much on the other side and treating her harsher than I would any other Keep youngster.

I walked into the training arena and immediately wished I had waited to hear the rest of Barabas’s sentence. Nothing could have prepared me to walk in and stare at purple-covered young shapeshifters, with my young protégé standing in the center, cackling next to Ascanio, completely free of destruction.

I turned around and walked out.

The instructor was waiting outside, doing the werecat equivalent to wringing her hands even though she was standing stock still.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, we were learning about tracking spells – how to cast them and how to recognize when they were being cast. There are also ways to disrupt tracking spells—”

I made a ‘hurry up’ motion, and the instructor switched gears. “Ascanio and Julie often pair up in this class, especially since tension between them is… sporadic, now, instead of continuous. I was helping Brock and Robert in the front, and heard a commotion. When I looked up, a purple bubble was surrounding Julie and Ascanio. When the nearest pair touched it… it exploded. I sent the rest of the students home, except the ones fully covered in purple, and waited for you.”

I was sure I had never given Voron this much trouble. Then again, Voron was terrifying and one teacher, and Julie was now in a rotating shift of teachers who also tried to keep from upsetting the Keep Princess.

“Right. First: were there any bad side effects of… being covered in purple?”

The cat shook her head. “It was more like, like dust. Or highly sticky glitter.”

Odd. “Are the parents of the students here, or on their way?”

“They… haven’t been notified. Yet.”

I pinched my brow. I had petitions today, and I didn’t want to have to deal with this mess. “Right, okay, well… right now, notify them to collect their children, convey my apologies for the mess, but also remind the students and their parents that students are not supposed to touch the magical workings of anyone unless they are one hundred percent aware of the nature of that working and are skilled enough to neutralize any side effects. As it stands, a purple bubble should never have resulted from casting a location spell. Correct?”

“Yes, Consort.”

I nodded. “Then I’m going to collect my two miscreants and try and get to the bottom of this,” I told her. “Tomorrow, we’ll discuss a way for Julie’s education to continue without her or the students providing constant interruption.”

What could I do? I knew where Julie was coming from, at least. I knew what it was like to be in classes and have people hiss things about me. She had only passive magic, though – sensing other people’s magic was not enough to create this so-called ‘purple bubble’. Come to think of it, Ascanio also didn’t have active magic in this way.

So how…?

I stepped back in the classroom and fixed Ascanio and Julie with a glare that made them flinch. “Are you ready to leave?,” I asked, in a tone that suggested I was definitely not looking for an answer, and they followed me out.

***

Up away from prying ears and eyes – or, at least, around ears and eyes that were supposed to keep quiet about what they saw – I rounded on the two of them.

“Just _what_ were you two thinking?” I demanded.

“If you’re going to blame anyone—” Julie began.

I shoved a finger forward, cutting off her words as effectively as I knew how. “I don’t care. I honestly do not care whose fault it was, because you know what? I believe it wasn’t you. I believe you did not start the fight. I believe that you are not blatantly disregarding my request to keep your head down and learn here because this is the only school option left to you until we settle on something we can all agree on and that doesn’t put Curran’s tail in a twist. I believe the other kids resent you, and know they’re trying to find any excuse to ostracize you. _But_.” I slashed my finger when her mouth opened again. “ _But_. That does not excuse retaliation. You should never decide to ‘teach them a lesson,’ because the playing field is by no means even, and dirty tricks are reserved for _when_?”

She and Ascanio stared at me mutinously.

“Dirty tricks are reserved for _when_?”

“When our lives are in danger,” they repeated sullenly. Well, Julie was sullen; I couldn’t quite get a read on Ascanio’s mood.

I nodded. “Exactly.”

“Can I speak _now_?” Julie bit out.

I threw my hands up in the air. “Sure. Why not? You are always free to speak your mind if you want.”

“One, it _isn’t_ our fault because we _didn’t_ make that bubble,” Julie said fiercely. “Two, even if it _was_ our fault, they know better than to touch strange magics, especially ones that stink of death! And _third_ , it—”

I put a hand up to cut off her words, and with my other hand pointed at Ascanio. “It smelled of death?”

Looking a little terrified – which is good, having a healthy dose of fear of me and possible punishments kept him from getting into too much trouble – Ascanio nodded.

“It was purple. The location spells you’d created before were what color? What smell?” I asked.

After a few seconds, Ascanio shrugged, looking at Julie. “This was the first day we were casting any of these?”

“Everyone else looked very… blue,” Julie said.

I turned away from them, frowning. “Something interrupted your magic. But this seems barely worth doing. What would come into the Keep to interfere with your magic specifically and do something as ridiculous and childish as cover people with something akin to purple powder?”

The question was asked more to myself, but Barabas, who had been doing his best impression of a door or wall, stepped forward. “I can have people scan the area, see if there’s anything they can find.”

“Do so. I don’t think it’s malicious, but these two are both passive magic users, not active. Nothing they could have done should have had that effect. And if someone is interfering with their workings in school, I want to know who and why.”

***

Of course, things don’t work as smoothly as everyone wishes they would, and it was the next day and I had to figure out what to do with Julie and Ascanio. They each had their own problems, their own inability to fit in with the larger group, and in some ways I felt for them because – well, I could understand not fitting in intimately. On the other hand, they had the _opportunity_ to fit in, an opportunity I never got, and I wanted them to take advantage of it while they could. They had the options to be part of a family, of friends, and that’s something important to survival in this post-Shift world. Working your way through this world alone was only going to lead to unhappy and frankly deadly outcomes.

That being said, they _didn’t fit in_ , and kids could be cruel to obvious outsiders.

I wished Curran was here – he often had a way of looking at problems that helped me figure out what to do. He often wasn’t as close to the problem as I was, and so could see options I missed. I helped him out similarly, when I could, but he’d had over thirteen years of wrangling shapeshifters to do what he wanted, how he wanted, and even convincing them it was their own idea. I had nothing on his people-solving skills, really.

Sometimes, especially with Roland hanging over my head, I wondered just what the hell he saw in me. The only other option was to walk down the road my aunt had opened up and that wasn’t a can of worms I was willing to play with right now.

But self-pity never got me anywhere, and I wasn’t one to dwell on what I couldn’t change, or on decisions I made in the past. I had a problem in front of me, and I needed to solve it.

Andrea was probably already at Cutting Edge Investigations. I could take Julie there, treat her as solely an intern, slide in lessons while I did so. Hell, I already was supposed to be teaching Ascanio how to function in a social setting in that manner anyway. It wasn’t a big step to teach Julie that and more. Her teachers had a curriculum, and so long as I took the books and kept up with the lessons taught to them in class…

But part of being integrated with the pack structure was actually _interacting_ with the pack. Ascanio put in his four hours a day. Julie needed to learn how to function with them. Hanging around me and mine only exacerbated the problem. It wasn’t as if I was a paragon of working well with others.

Right now, teaching Julie alone looked to be the only solution, but maybe she could hold on for a week or two longer in the pack’s school until Curran got back and I could talk with him. He would probably have a better solution, honestly.

With a groan, I pressed fingers against my temple and then stood up. There wasn’t much I could do right now, but I’d talk to her teachers, see if I could get that curriculum from them. Her education had been interrupted enough, and I had hoped that we could find a year-round school like the boarding school she’d been at, but so far only three of the eight possible options were year-round ones. If she didn’t end up picking one of the year-round schools… it was April. There was one month left in school – and that was if, by some miracle, she managed to pick a school in the next two weeks. A typical school year would be over.

For a minute, my hopes rose. If the school year would be over, then it would be summer, and since she might not pick a year-round school, she’d have off. I could just pull her from school and keep her at Cutting Edge, figure shit out over the summer break, when Curran was back.

But that wasn’t being a responsible parent. Even in the 9-month school year system, she could still sit for the tests that would qualify her to move on to the next grade. She needed to go to school. I couldn’t get out of it because it was near the end of the school year.

So, curriculum from her teachers. More lessons with the sword and spear, more lessons with Andrea and the bow and guns, more lessons with Curran and hand-to-hand. Keep her busy, occupied, and keep her and Ascanio more or less civil – and keep the both of them more or less away from Derek.

There was a knock on the door.

With a sigh, I called out, “Enter!”

Barabas opened the door, looked at me, and grimaced. “We have a situation.”

***

I stared at the m-scan as if it would magically make it change color.

“I’ve never seen pink before,” Dali said helpfully. “That probably means that the human who cast this magic—”

“Is touched by the undead, but not in any significant way,” I finished, sighing. I didn’t know what it meant, either, and I hadn’t seen pink before in my career as a merc. Purple, yeah. Dark red, yeah. Blue, yeah. Pink?

“Well, it probably means that some human is using dead magic, right?” Barbaras asked.

“There’s no such thing as ‘dead’ magic,” I countered absently, staring at the m-scan even harder. “All magic is living. Magic that originates from vampires or ghouls or ghasts or even reanimated corpses – which is incredibly difficult magic – is red. Magic that originates from humans – chants, willpower, even energy blasts – is blue. A rouge vampire shows red on a scanner; a piloted vampire shows purple. This…”

Dali leaned forward. “This is light purple. Lavender, maybe. Going off the basis that the stronger the magic from the undead, the redder something shows… does this mean that there is way more human magic? Maybe piloting something that is extremely young or weak?”

Jim, who was watching us stare at this scrap of paper from the doorway of the classroom, rumbled, “Whatever it is, it got inside the Keep, and that’s something we can’t let stand. Our children are supposed to be safe here.”

“Which begs the question,” Barabas added on, “Was this because of where Julie and Ascanio were in the room, or did it target them specifically?”

I frowned. I had sent the two of them to Cutting Edge with Derek (already a disaster, in my mind) and Andrea was waiting for them along with a Latin textbook – they were supposed to be learning the language, since so many spells, spellbooks, and enchantments used that as a base language.

(More magics used Aramaic and early Arabic dialects, but Latin would be hard enough to start with.)

“There’s just not enough here to make that kind of call. Not enough information. We’ll have to wait until it attacks again, or maybe it won’t,” Barbas said eventually.

And while what he said was true, I had the sneaking suspicion that something was going on I was familiar with, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on it yet.

***

Cutting Edge was too quiet, which – well, it wasn’t unexpected, but it definitely wasn’t the optimal environment. Andrea had Ascanio in one corner and Julie in another, and Derek was nowhere to be seen.

I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Don’t start on me,” she growled.

I tactfully didn’t bring up the fact that she still hadn’t resolved things with Aunt B or Raphael, hadn’t even made a move in that direction yet, and instead glanced at the phone.

“Some possible leads, but nothing really solid,” she said, correctly anticipating my look. “Your troublemakers are separated because they can’t act like adults. And Derek is sent out because _he’s_ supposed to act like an adult but when he’s around Ascanio he seems to lose his temper more often than not.”

I had some suspicions as to why that was, but Derek would deal with it on his own. He was a good wolf, one that was skilled and powerful, and he wouldn’t let Ascanio set his progress back. He just needed to not get so irritated with the kid.

Easy for me to say. I still got pissed at him.

“You ever see pink on an m-scan before?”

She frowned, and I pretended to ignore how Ascanio and Julie perked up at the words. They’d get what was coming for them soon enough.

“Pink?” she repeated, as if saying it would make it magically make more sense. It didn’t – I knew, because I’d done it too.

“Pink,” I confirmed. “Our working theory is that it’s a young undead or something like that, but who knows? We also don’t know how that happened inside the Keep – no strange scents anywhere around – and we don’t know if it’ll happen again. We also don’t know if it was aimed at the Keep, and our two interns were in the way, or if they were targeted, or even if just one of them was targeted.”

“Well.” Andrea digested this a minute and then shrugged philosophically. “Nothing we can do about it until it happens again—”

A glowing light purple started to glow close to the window. I eyed it, and then sighed.

“Julie, Ascanio, go upstairs,” Andrea said calmly. “Is this dangerous?”

“I can’t sense any kind of offensive magic, but who the hell knows?” I said, unsheathing my sword. “ _Julie_ , Ascanio.”

They had been going reluctantly slow; now, they kicked it into high gear and scurried out of the front office, just as the purple coalesced into the shape of a human. The face was vaguely familiar…

Then it wavered, and collapsed, and then rebuilt itself into a young woman I had zero familiarity with – but Andrea gasped and then grit her teeth.

“Do you know this person?”

“She’s dead,” Andrea said tightly.

It was as if a strike of lightning hit my body, and I rolled my eyes. “Well, that makes sense then.”

She looked at me, confused. “What?” she asked.

“This makes sense. Or,” I corrected, because in some ways it _really, really didn’t_ , “this makes more sense now than it did this morning.”

“How does – how does this make sense?”

There was movement at the top of the stairs and I took the moment to bellow, “I better not be hearing eavesdroppers crouching at the railing!”

There was the patter of feet – Julie’s _and_ Ascanio’s – before I turned to answer Andrea.

Which is when Derek walked in and the door broke through the light, scattering it into pieces.

He blinked at the motes floating around and then narrowed his eyes. “What happened?”

***

“It was – hell, too many years ago to count,” I said, sighing, as Jim scowled and bristled at the corner and Dali was upstairs quizzing the kids about how far they’d gotten in their Latin (I knew it wasn’t far, but better her quizzing them than me at this point; if I snapped I might say something to Julie that I really, really shouldn’t). Andrea and Derek were sitting the chairs across from my desk, watching me attentively. “It was some gladiator, pit-fighting shit that I was mired in, and it was really, really amateur. This guy was one of my opponents; he can call up shades of the dead, but once they latch onto your skin they start feeding off your pain and your anger and whatever else negative energy you have. He’s not calling up actual dead people – shades are barely classified as undead, which explains the light purple color, I suppose. And he works remotely; he was one of my easier wins, because so long as you’re fast enough that they don’t touch you, you’re safe, and you knock him out or disrupt their body with big enough amounts of iron or steel, and they disappear.”

“Why is he here now?” Jim asked from his corner.

“Hell if I know,” I grumbled, folding my arms. “I’m pretty strongly warded against all tracking magic.”

Quietly, Derek said, “Julie isn’t.”

I froze.

“She’s connected to you, now, and she has your basic shields but nothing really protecting her in the same way you are protected from remote magics. Which explains how that magic got into the Keep, if it was looking for your signature and found her.”

I looked at the corner where the window was. The building was warded, but shades were such faint and frankly highly specific and finicky magic that most wards didn’t keep out shades. I could easily add a ward, but that wouldn’t solve the problem. Especially if Julie ended up going to school – shades were laughable, and the guy was an inept fighter, but let them get close enough and they would get serious.

With a sigh, I rubbed the back of my neck. “There’s no way to trace a shade back to its master; the magic connecting the two is too faint. If a shade touches you, that could make it corporeal enough for you to set a tracking spell on it, but that’s a hit-or-miss option; most shades never become corporeal unless you have enough negative energy inside you that it’s enough to bolster the magic the caster originally used. Honestly, I have no idea how to track him down because he could be in a house across the street or in Unicorn Lane or in some random inn or motel outside of the city.”

“Can we at least get a name?” Jim demanded.

I shrugged. It was probably arrogant of me, but when I was thirteen years old I wasn’t exactly taking names when I was kicking the ass Voron told me to kick. He was a nameless fighter from a tiny South American city in a forgotten South American country, and six to nine months later Voron was dead and my life was irrevocably changed. I didn’t exactly have clear memory of this guy. “I know that his title was ‘the Necromancer’ and that he was this spindly guy, real skinny. I don’t know exactly how old he was, but when I saw him – which was over twelve years ago, by the way – he wasn’t as old as – as my father, but he wasn’t as young as me.”

“This is highly unhelpful,” Jim snarled, which was when Dali came down, trailing Julie and Ascanio, and stopped at the tension in the room.

Julie, being Julie with zero self-preservation, immediately asked, “What was that?”

“What was what?” I asked.

“The purple light. The undead light,” she clarified almost immediately.

Ascanio nodded. “It smelled of rot, too.”

I closed my eyes, trying to drag forth anything beyond the scent of blood-stained sand, the shouts from the stadium of bloodthirsty onlookers, Voron implacable, steel-like voice telling me that I would either succeed or I would fail, and it was up to me. “I think… I mean, all magic needs a physical focus. The rot could be that he needs some amount of dead flesh to focus the shades, link them back to himself, but I really can’t remember.”

For a long minute, no one said anything, and then Jim growled something under his breath and stormed out of the room. Dali looked at the m-scanner she had carried into the building. “Do we not need this anymore?”

“No, thanks Dali,” I sighed. “We figured out the who and the what. We just need to figure out the where.” And the why, but really, so long as this guy stopped trying to send shades after my ward – once I fully shielded her from whatever bit of my magic was leaking through her aura and allowing this creep to latch on to her – they why didn’t really matter in the long-term, so long as he was stopped.

I honestly didn’t remember this guy. I couldn’t think of why the hell he’d want to do this, now, thirteen or twelve years later. Surely he had to be at least in his thirties, if not his forties. I was thirteen – he wasn’t Voron’s age (even though I knew Voron was old, older than most humans grew, Voron looked like he was forty-five) but he wasn’t a teenager like me.

Once the door closed behind Dali and Jim, Ascanio and Julie approached like overeager Rottweiler puppies, eager for a direction to attack. “Are we going to find this guy?” Ascanio asked, cracking his knuckles.

I gave him a gimlet stare and stood up. “ _I_ am going to shield Julie right now, since we think it’s latching onto her because—”

“Because my magic – because your magic is protecting me, now?” Julie asked, eyes narrow and considering as she corrected herself to keep anyone – including Ascanio – from finding out her magic had changed due to her ‘cure’ for loupism.

She was too smart for my own good, unfortunately. I wanted to pull out my hair and settled on pinching the bridge of my nose. “Yes, because my magic is protecting you. I didn’t put as complete shields on you as I have on me, mostly because that amount of protection creates a physical weight that slows you down and it feeds on your own magic, but I guess I shouldn’t have skimped. We’ll go put those on, and hopefully he’ll be unable to send those shades after you.”

“Shades?” Ascanio repeated.

Which then devolved into an impromptu history lesson on what primitive people called ghosts and practitioners called shades, leading into the different ways to defeat them and how to prevent one’s self from being caught unawares.

When the lesson was done, and the shields created, there was no more reason to remain at the office building. Time to pack up and head home, and Derek volunteered to drive behind me. Apparently, our precautions and my dismissal of the shades was not enough to reassure the boy wonder, who took his guarding duties way too seriously for my taste. Thankfully, Ascanio wasn’t exactly the sharpest at picking up on the undercurrent for why Derek picked to follow me, and tried to call shotgun at the same time Julie did. In the end, Derek told Ascanio to get into his car, and Julie climbed triumphantly in the seat next to me as I began to chant.

“You know,” she said, “my magic looks a lot like yours. Is that what’s _really_ drawing him to me?”

I finished chanting before answering, which gave me a lot of time to think over what I was going to say. Once the car was up and running, I said quietly, “Yes. I used my magic to cure you, but my magic is…”

“It’s hard to look at,” Julie said, repeating her first complaint about it. “It’s also hard to quantify. I mean, with everything I’ve learned about magic and the types of magic, I still can’t classify what you… have. And!” she said loudly, cutting off the words I was about to say. “And, no one’s magic is identical to anyone else’s. No one’s. Each person has their own signature magic.” She paused, and I let out a sigh.

“Yours looks identical to mine now, doesn’t it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not identical, but damn close.”

“Language,” I growled.

She lifted an eyebrow at me.

I rubbed one hand through my hair and let out a heavy sigh. “Okay. I mean, there are things about what I did to cure you that I still can’t tell you yet. There are things about what I did to cure you that I still don’t fully understand. But I had to replace some of your magic with mine. I had to… purify you, in a way, to remove the loupism. So your magic now looks a lot like mine, and I should have put better protections on you after it happened but honestly I had no idea how much your magic had changed.”

She squinted at me – she was no fool, and was in fact aware when she was being bullshitted, but there wasn’t anything more I was going to tell her, not until she was older. She didn’t need to know how much my words now affected her, and she didn’t need to worry about my history and my parentage. Not yet.

“And this guy who is doing this?”

The topic change was a kind of peace offering, one I took gratefully. “This guy?”

“Yeah, what he’s got to do with you?”

It wasn’t exactly a _better_ topic, but it got us off of the topic I didn’t want to talk about, so I figured I might as well. “You were there at the Midnight Games, and I explained – did I explain to you? – that I’d been in… an arena like that before.”

Julie shrugged, but her body language was too eager to be casual. “Aunt B said a few things, but I could guess you didn’t like it and had some experience with it. You shouted a lot at the spectators.”

I winced and turned my eyes studiously to the road in front of me as we turned onto the long drive that would take us to the Keep. “Well, I – Greg wasn’t my first father figure. I had a… a stepfather before him. Kinda.”

“Kinda?”

“He protected me and my mother, and when she died he raised me. He was the one who taught me to fight to defend myself—” I wasn’t going to say from whom I was defending myself from— “and he did that by… putting me in arenas, like that one at the Midnight Games. Only not really, because the Midnight Games was a serious and high-stakes arena, and the ones I went to were normally… amateur ones. Not exactly the cream of the crop. And this guy is one of the guys I had to face in the arena, and I nearly killed him. Beat him badly, and he was easily… oh, twice my age, maybe. His magic needed long-range, and it did touch me, get a feel for my signature, but once I realized he was shi— uh, crap at short-range, well, I just went up to him. Expected him to defend himself better, honestly; if you’re in the arena, you always need to have a plan in case someone gets close-quarters with you.”

Julie tapped her fingers on the seat as we pulled into the Keep’s gates and into the large garage that held all the Pack’s vehicles. The stables were outside, of course, and away from the loud and frankly smelly-even-to-my-nose enchanted cars, so at least we were only smelling exhaust and enchanted water, not horse shit. I pulled to a stop, Derek and Ascanio’s Jeep rolling in behind us with a muted rumble our windows and doors kept out.

“Julie?” I asked.

“How old were you, when you were in that arena?” she asked suddenly.

I breathed in deep and dropped my head back against the headrest. “Julie, does it matter?”

“It kinda does, because it was already a shitty thing to do—”

“Language,” I repeated doggedly.

“—to a kid you’re raising, and I know you said you were with Greg for a while, but you were still a minor, right? When you were with Greg. Which means you were a minor when you were with this other stepfather.”

“Voron,” I said wearily.

She shrugged again, in a dismissive way that meant she didn’t really care what the guy’s name was, and instead repeated. “How old were you?”

“I was thirteen, Julie. Thirteen, and I never want that to happen to another child, which is why I wanted you _far away_ from the crazy shit my life regularly turns into,” I said snappishly.

There was silence in the car, and then Julie said solemnly, “Language.”

I fixed her with a stare. “I think it would be better if you made yourself scarce for a while.”

She grinned impishly and darted out of the car.

When I got out, Derek raised an eyebrow at me.

“Don’t look at me, I didn’t initiate the heart-to-heart,” I said grumpily as I made my way into the Keep.

***

“So the problem remains,” Jim said, a little bitingly, “that some idiot is attempting to seek out the Consort with his magic. It doesn’t matter if he’s an incompetent idiot – the fact is that he’s trying, and even incompetent idiots get lucky sometimes.”

“There’s really no way to track him down,” I added helpfully. “Everything’s done remotely. Hell, he could have increased his magical strength and not even _be_ in Atlanta, and is sending this.”

Jim glared at me severely. “ _The fact remains_ ,” he said in a forbidding voice, “that this is not something we can allow to pass. For one, the Beast Lord would murder me where I stood if he found out I didn’t get rid of this person, even if he isn’t a threat.”

“Who isn’t a threat?”

All the members of our impromptu security meeting turned around to see Curran, eyebrow raised, in the doorway. Jim looked like he was ready to swallow his tongue.

“Some idiot from my past is throwing shades at my magic through Julie,” I said succinctly. “Fortunately, he’s inept and doesn’t look to be any smarter than he was when I first faced him, so we have no idea how to find him. Because he’s so bad at this.”

Curran transferred his gaze to Jim, who now looked like he’d bitten into a lemon. “We can’t find him?”

“He did magic _in the Keep_ , which can’t be tolerated. However, he’s an idiot, so he could be anywhere. His magic is so unfocused and so short-lived there’s no way to get a lock on it. This happened when the Consort was—”

“Thirteen,” I sighed.

“Thirteen,” he echoed, “and so it’s not like its anything we could conceivably track down with any degree of surety.”

Curran frowned. “Thirteen?”

I threw my hands up. “Look, you killed people when you were thirteen too. I was in an arena, and I let him live. Clearly, that was a mistake, but it’s not like I could’ve looked down the road and said, ‘hey, this asshole will one day come back to mildly annoy me and try to take on the whole _Pack_ , so I might as well kill the guy.’”

Slowly, Curran shook his head, and though I could see the gleam of amusement in the corner of his mouth and in his eyes, he looked foreboding enough as he walked into the room that Jim, Derek, Dali, and Andrea dropped their gazes. “So, if I get this right, some idiot you already beat in the past has come around for a rematch, and has challenged the Pack by casting magic in the Keep, and attempted to go after my ward—”

“ _Our_ ward,” I grumbled.

“—and no one can find him?” Curran finished, coming to a stop behind my chair and putting his hands on my shoulders.

(It was embarrassing how much just that small touch took some of the tension out of my body.)

There was dead silence after his words, and then Curran snorted. “Have you, perhaps, looked into illegal fighting pits and the like?”

There was a longer silence, this one awkward, and then Jim cleared his throat. “We assumed he was here to target Kate.”

“Oh, he very well might be,” Curran agreed amiably – a sure clue that he was anything _but_ amiable. “But something had to draw his attention here first. We already know that Kate beat him once. We also know that Kate’s pretty well warded and protected, right?”

No one answered.

“So it stands to reason _something_ else called him to Atlanta, and the easiest way to track him down right now begins and ends with illegal pit fights.”

“I’m… gonna head out,” Dali said, and Andrea popped up and followed her out of the room.

Derek stood, but Jim bowed his head. “My Lord, I—”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Curran said immediately. “Hell, Jim, you don’t even need to bow your head. If you’re all telling me the truth, this is one moronic asshole who is a nobody. We’re used to dealing with legitimate threats, not minor inconveniences.”

Jim stiffly left the room, and Derek smiled at Curran. “It’s good to have you back, Beast Lord.”

Curran let out a rumbling growl, and Derek chuckled as he left. When the room was empty, he leaned down over and gave me a highly awkward-but-no-less-hot upside-down kiss. Then, with a frustrated growl he pulled the chair out and kissed me properly.

“Hello,” I hummed against his lips. “Julie’s very smart.”

“She is,” he whispered, lips sliding from mine to my jaw. “What brought this on?”

With a sigh, I patted his head and pushed him slightly away so I could stand up. “I had to tell her about Voron, because of this, but she – well, really Derek – latched on to the fact that this guy was sending these shades after Julie because her magic looks like mine.”

He edged back but still crowded close to me, not wanting to give me space even as I stood up and nearly smashed my head into his nose doing so. “You knew you’d have to tell her one day.”

“Yeah, but I want her… I want her to grow up without that hanging over her head. I want her to have a more normal childhood than I did.”

“She’s already been on the streets. She’s been sent away to a boarding school. She knows how to handle herself – more or less – against shapeshifters. Normal is relative, Kate, and what she’s getting is a safe, loving childhood. Isn’t that enough?” Curran rumbled.

I looked at him and smiled crookedly. “I suppose so. Still doesn’t mean I want to settle for ‘enough’ when it comes to her.”

“You wouldn’t be any other way, I’m sure,” he laughed, and then the tightness at the corners of his eyes grew, overtook his face.

“You didn’t get the panacea,” I murmured.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what to do, Kate. Our people _need_ this. I don’t know what other avenues to explore.”

Curling my fingers around his neck, pulling his mouth down to mine, I murmured, “You’ll figure something out. You’re great at problem-solving.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied confidently.

***

“Whatever happened to the pink magic?” Julie asked me as we drove to the school Curran and I had decided would be the best fit for her, even as I desperately hoped she agreed.

“Oh,” I said, thinking back to Jim’s almost gleeful report. “Jim found him. Scared him straight. He’s out of Atlanta now.”

She squinted at me. “What did he want?”

I laughed. “Would you believe that this guy was so bad at magic that he didn’t even realize he set the thing after me? As best I can tell, he’s been just blindly aiming his shades at the people in his fights, and since he aimed it at me, I’m now his default magic his shades look for when he releases them until they get distracted by the other opponent in the arena. Only this time, being in Atlanta, the shades could actually reach me – rather, _you_ – and so that’s why they were appearing.”

Julie’s eyebrows popped up. “Really?”

“It’s why we want you to train your magic and your discipline, so you’re _not_ incompetent like this idiot,” I said.

“That wasn’t subtle, Kate,” she drawled.

I pulled into the school’s parking lot and smiled widely at her. “Curran and I really think you’ll like this place.”

She looked at me with all the skepticism a teenager could muster. “I’ll be the judge of that.”


End file.
